ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT 



ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT 

OF THE UNITED STATES 

DELIVERED AT 

A JOINT SESSION OF 

THE TWO HOUSES 

OF CONGRESS 

APRIL 2 

1917 

• 




M D CCCC XVIII 



^ 



ADDRESS TO THE CONGRESS 



ADDRESS 

TO THE 

SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES 

April 2, 1917 

Gentlemen of the Congress: 

I have called the Congress into extraordinary session be- 
cause there are serious, very serious, choices of policy to 
be made, and made immediately, which it was neither 
right nor constitutionally permissible that I should as- 
sume the responsibility of making. 

On the third of February last I officially laid before you 
the extraordinary announcementof the Imperial German 
Government that on and after the first day of February 
it was its purpose to put aside all restraints of law or of 
humanity and use its submarines to sink every vessel that 
sought to approach either the ports of Great Britain and 
Ireland or the western coasts of Europe or any of the 
ports controlled by the enemies of Germany within the 
Mediterranean. That had seemed to be the object of the 
German submarine warfare earlier in the war, but since 
April of last year the Imperial Government had some- 
what restrained the commanders of its undersea craft in 
conformity with its promise then given to us that pas- 
senger boats should not be sunk and that due warning 
would be given to all other vessels which its submarines 
might seek to destroy, when no resistance was offered or 



escape attempted, and care taken that their crews were 
given at least a fair chance to save their lives in their open 
boats. The precautions taken were meagre and haphaz- 
ard enough, as was proved in distressing instance after 
instance in the progress of the cruel and unmanly busi- 
ness, but a certain degree of restraint was observed. The 
new policy has swept every restriction aside. Vessels of 
every kind, whatever their flag, their character, their cargo, 
their destination, their errand, have been ruthlessly sent to 
the bottom without warning and without thought of help 
or mercy for those on board, the vessels of friendly neu- 
trals along with those of belligerents. Even hospital ships 
and ships carrying relieftothesorelybereaved and stricken 
people of Belgium, though the latter were provided with 
safe conduct through the proscribed areas by the German 
Government itself and were distinguished by unmistak- 
able marks of identity, have been sunk with the same 
reckless lack of compassion or of principle. 

I was for a little while unable to believe that such things 
would in fact be done by any government that had hith- 
erto subscribed to the humane practices of civilized na- 
tions. International law had its origin in the attempt to 
set up some law which would be respected and observed 
upon the seas, where no nation had right of dominion 
and where lay the free highways of the world. By pain- 
ful stage after stage has that law been built up, with mea- 
gre enough results, indeed, after all was accomplished 
that could be accomplished, but always with a clear view, 
at least, of what the heart and conscience of mankind de- 
manded. This minimum of right the German Govern- 
ment has swept aside under the plea of retaliation and 
necessity and because it had no weapons which it could 
use at sea except these which it is impossible to employ 
as it is employing them without throwing to the winds 



all scruples of humanity or of respect for the understand^ 
ingsthat were supposed to underlie the intercourse of the 
world. I am not now thinking of the loss of property in- 
volved, immense and serious as that is, but only of the 
wanton and wholesale destruction of the lives of non- 
combatants, men, women, and children, engaged in pur- 
suits which have always, even in the darkest periods of 
modern history, been deemed innocent and legitimate. 
Property can be paid for ; the lives of peaceful and inno- 
cent people cannot be. The present German submarine 
warfare against commerce is a warfare against mankind. 

It is a war against all nations. American ships have 
been sunk, American lives taken, in ways which it has 
stirred us very deeply to learn of, but the ships and peo- 
ple of other neutral and friendly nations have been sunk 
and overwhelmed in the waters in the same way. There 
has been no discrimination. The challenge is to all man- 
kind. Each nation must decide for itself how it will meet 
it. The choice we make for ourselves must be made with 
a moderation of counsel and a temperateness of judgment 
befitting our character and our motives as a nation. We 
must put excited feeling away. Our motive will not be 
revenge or the victorious assertion of the physical might 
of the nation, but only the vindication of right, of human 
right, of which we are only a single champion. 

When I addressed the Congress on the twenty-sixth 
of February last I thought that it would suffice to assert 
our neutral rights with arms, our right to use the seas 
against unlawful interference, our right to keep our peo- 
ple safe against unlawful violence. But armed neutrality, 
it now appears, is impracticable. Because submarines are 
in effect outlaws when used as the German submarines 
have been used against merchant shipping, it is impossi- 
ble to defend ships against their attacks as the law of na- 



tions has assumed that merchantmen woulddefend them- 
selves against privateers or cruisers, visible craft giving 
chase upon the open sea. It is common prudence in such 
circumstances, grim necessity indeed, to endeavour to de- 
stroy them before they have shown their own intention. 
They must be dealt with upon sight, if dealt with at all. 
The German Government denies the right of neutrals to 
use arms at all within the areas of the sea which it has 
proscribed, even in the defense of rights which no mod- 
ern publicist has ever before questioned their right to de- 
fend. The intimation is conveyed that the armed guards 
which we have placed on our merchan tships will be treated 
as beyond the pale of law and subject to be dealt with as 
pirates would be. Armed neutrality is ineffectual enough 
at best ; in such circumstances and in the face of such 
pretensions it is worse than ineffectual: it is likely only to 
produce what it was meant to prevent; it is practically cer- 
tain to draw us into the war without either the rights or 
the effectiveness of belligerents. There is one choice we 
cannot make, we are incapable of making: we will not 
choose the path of submission and suffer the most sacred 
rights of our nation and our people to be ignored or vio- 
lated. The wrongs against which we now array ourselves 
are no common wrongs; they cut to the very roots of 
human life. 

With a profound sense of the solemn and even trag- 
ical character of the step I am taking and of the grave re- 
sponsibilities which it involves, but in unhesitating obe- 
dience to what I deem my constitutional duty, I advise 
that the Congress declare the recent course of the Impe- 
rial German Government to be in fact nothing less than 
war against the Government and people of the United 
States; that it formally accept the status of belligerent 
which has thus been thrust upon it; and that it take im- 



mediate steps not only to put the country in a more thor- 
ough state of defense but also to exert all its power and 
employ all its resources to bring the Government of the 
German Empire to terms and end the war. 

What this will involve is clear. It will involve the ut- 
most practicable co-operation in counsel and action with 
the governments now at war with Germany, and, as in- 
cident to that, the extension to those governments of the 
most liberal financial credits, in order that our resources 
may so far as possible be added to theirs. It will involve 
the organization and mobilization of all the material re- 
sources of the country to supply the materials of war and 
serve the incidental needs of the nation in the most abun- 
dant and yet the most economical and efficient way pos- 
sible. It will involve the immediate full equipment of 
the navy in all respects but particularly in supplying it 
with the best means of dealing with the enemy's sub- 
marines. It will involve the immediate addition to the 
armed forces of the United States already provided for by 
law in case of war at least five hundred thousand men, 
who should, in my opinion, be chosen upon the principle 
of universal liability to service, and also the authoriza- 
tion of subsequent additional increments of equal force 
so soon as they may be needed and can be handled in 
training. It will involve also, of course, the granting of 
adequate credits to the Government, sustained, I hope, so 
far as they can equitably be sustained by the present gen- 
eration, by well-conceived taxation. 

I say sustained so far as may be equitable by taxation 
because it seems to me that it would be most unwise to 
base the credits which will now be necessary entirely on 
money borrowed. It is our duty, I most respectfully urge, 
to protect our people so far as we may against the very 
serious hardships and evils which would be likely to arise 

5 



out of the inflation which would be produced by vast 
loans. 

In carrying out the measures by which these things 
are to be accomplished we should keep constantly in mind 
the wisdom of interfering as little as possible in our own 
preparation and in the equipment of our own military 
forces with the duty, — for it will be a very practical duty, 
— of supplying the nations already at war with Germany 
with the materials which they can obtain only from us 
or by our assistance. They are in the field and we should 
help them in every way to be effective there. 

I shall take the liberty of suggesting, through the sev- 
eral executive departments of the Government, for the 
consideration of your committees, measures for the ac- 
complishment of the several objects I have mentioned. I 
hope that it will be your pleasure to deal with them as 
having been framed after very careful thought by the 
branch of the Government upon which the responsibil- 
ity of conducting the war and safeguarding the nation 
will most directly fall. 

While we do these things, these deeply momentous 
things, let us be very clear, and make very clear to all the 
world what our motives and our objects are. My own 
thought has not been driven from its habitual and nor- 
mal course by the unhappy events of the last two months, 
and I do not believe that the thought of the nation has 
been altered or clouded by them. I have exactly the same 
things in mind now that I had in mind when I addressed 
the Senate on the twenty-second of January last ; the 
same that I had in mind when I addressed the Congress 
on the third of February and on the twenty-sixth of Feb- 
ruary. Our object now, as then, is to vindicate the prin- 
ciples of peace and justice in the life of the world as against 
selfish and autocratic power and to set up amongst the 
6 



really free and self-governed peoples of the world such a 
concert of purpose and of action as will henceforth ensure 
the observance of those principles. Neutrality is no longer 
feasible or desirable where the peace of the world is in- 
volved and the freedom of its peoples, and the menace to 
that peace and freedom lies in the existence of autocratic 
governments backed by organized force which is controlled 
wholly by their will, not by the will of their people. We 
have seen the last of neutrality in such circumstances. 
We are at the beginning of an age in which it will be in- 
sisted that the same standards of conduct and of respon- 
sibility for wrong done shall be observed among nations 
and their governments that are observed among the indi- 
vidual citizens of civilized states. 

We have no quarrel with the German people. We 
have no feeling towards them but one of sympathy and 
friendship. It was not upon their impulse that their gov- 
ernment acted in entering this war. It was not with their 
previous knowledge or approval. 1 1 was a war determined 
upon as wars used to be determined upon in the old, un- 
happy days when peoples were nowhere consulted by their 
rulers and wars were provoked and waged in the interest 
of dynasties or of little groups of ambitious men who were 
accustomed to use their fellow men as pawns and tools. 
Self-governed nations do not fill their neighbour states 
with spies or set the course of intrigue to bring about some 
critical posture of affairs which will give them an oppor- 
tunity to strike and make conquest. Such designs can be 
successfully worked out only under cover and where no 
one has the right to ask questions. Cunningly contrived 
plans of deception or aggression, carried, it may be, from 
generation to generation, can be worked out and kept from 
the light only within the privacy of courts or behind the 
carefully guarded confidences of a narrow and privileged 



class. They are happily impossible where public opinion 
commands and insists upon full information concerning 
all the nation's affairs. 

A steadfast concert for peace can never be maintained 
except by a partnership of democratic nations. No auto- 
cratic government could be trusted to keep faith within 
it or observe its convenants. It must be a league of hon- 
our, a partnership of opinion. Intrigue would eat its vitals 
away; the plottings of inner circles who could plan what 
they would and render account to no one would be a cor- 
ruption seated at its very heart. Only free peoples can 
hold their purpose and their honour steady to a common 
end and prefer the interests of mankind to any narrow 
interest of their own. 

Does not every American feel that assurance has been 
added to our hope for the future peace of the world by 
the wonderful and heartening things that have been hap- 
pening within the last few weeks in Russia? Russia was 
known by those who knew it best to have been always 
in fact democratic at heart, in all the vital habits of her 
thought, in all the intimate relationships of her people 
that spoke their natural instinct, their habitual attitude 
towards life. The autocracy that crowned the summit 
of her political structure, long as it had stood and terrible 
as was the reality of its power, was not in fact Russian 
in origin, character, or purpose; and now it has been 
shaken off and the great, generous Russian people have 
been added in all their naive majesty and might to the 
forces that are fighting for freedom in the world, for jus- 
tice, and for peace. Here is a fit partner for a League of 
Honour. 

One of the things that has served to convince us that 
the Prussian autocracy was not and could never be our 
friend is that from the very outset of the present war it 
8 



has filled our unsuspecting communities and even our 
offices of government with spies and set criminal in- 
trigues everywhere afoot against our national unity of 
counsel, our peace within and without, our industries and 
our commerce. Indeed it is now evident that its spies 
were here even before the war began ; and it is unhappily 
not a matter of conjecture but a fact proved in our courts 
of justice that the intrigues which have more than once 
come perilously near to disturbing the peace and dislo- 
cating the industries of the country have been carried on 
at the instigation, with the support, and even under the 
personal direction of official agents of the Imperial Gov- 
ernment accredited to the Government of the United 
States. Even in checking these things and trying to ex- 
tirpate them we have sought to put the most generous 
interpretation possible upon them because we knew that 
their source lay, not in any hostile feeling or purpose of 
the German people towards us (who were, no doubt as 
ignorant of them as we ourselves were), but only in the 
selfish designs of a Government that did what it pleased 
and told its people nothing. But they have played their 
part in serving to convince us at last that that Govern- 
ment entertains no real friendship for us and means to 
act against our peace and security at its convenience. 
That it means to stir up enemies against us at our very 
doors the intercepted note to the German Minister at 
Mexico City is eloquent evidence. 

We are accepting this challenge of hostile purpose be- 
cause we know that in such a government, following such 
methods, we can never have a friend; and that in the pres- 
ence of its organized power, always lying in wait to ac- 
complish we know not what purpose, there can be no 
assured security for the democratic governments of the 
world. We are now about to accept gauge of battle with 

9 



this natural foe to liberty and shall, if necessary, spend 
the whole force of the nation to check and nullify its pre^ 
tensions and its power. We are glad, now that we see 
the facts with no veil of false pretence about them, to 
fight thus for the ultimate peace of the world and for the 
liberation of its peoples, the German peoples included : 
for the rights of nations great and small and the privilege 
of men everywhere to choose their way of life and of 
obedience. The world must be made safe for democracy. 
Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of 
political liberty. We have no selfish ends to serve. We 
desire no conquest, no dominion. We seek no indemni' 
ties for ourselves, no material compensation for the sac^ 
rifices we shall freely make. We are but one of the cham' 
pions of the rights of mankind. We shall be satisfied 
when those rights have been made as secure as the faith 
and the freedom of nations can make them. 

Just because we fight without rancour and without 
selfish object, seeking nothing for ourselves but what we 
shall wish to share with all free peoples, we shall, I feel 
confident, conduct our operations as belligerents without 
passion and ourselves observe with proud punctilio the 
principles of right and of fair play we profess to be 
fighting for. 

I have said nothing of the governments allied with the 
Imperial Government of Germany because they have not 
made war upon us or challenged us to defend our right 
and our honour. The Austro^Hungarian Government 
has, indeed, avowed its unqualified endorsement and ac^ 
ceptance of the reckless and lawless submarine warfare 
adopted now without disguise by the Imperial German 
Government, and it has therefore not been possible for 
this Government to receive Count Tarnowski, the Anv 
bassador recently accredited to this Government by the 



Imperial and Royal Government of Austria-Hungary; 
but that Government has not actually engaged in warfare 
against citizens of the United States on the seas, and I 
take the liberty, for the present at least, of postponing a 
discussion of our relations with the authorities at Vienna. 
We enter this war only where we are clearly forced into 
it because there are no other means of defending our rights. 
It will be all the easier for us to conduct ourselves as 
belligerents in a high spirit of right and fairness because 
we act without animus, not in enmity towards a people 
or with the desire to bring any injury or disadvantage upon 
them, but only in armed opposition to an irresponsible 
government which has thrown aside all considerations of 
humanity and of right and is running amuck. We are, 
let me say again, the sincere friends of the German peo- 
ple, and shall desire nothing so much as the early re-estab- 
lishment of intimate relations of mutual advantage be- 
tween us, — however hard it maybe for them, for the time 
being, to believe that this is spoken from our hearts. We 
have borne with their present government through all 
these bitter months because of that friendship, — exercis- 
ing a patience and forbearance which would otherwise 
have been impossible. We shall, happily, still have an op- 
portunity to prove that friendship in our daily attitude 
and actions towards the millions of men and women of 
German birth and native sympathy who live amongst us 
and share our life, and we shall be proud to prove it towards 
all who are in fact loyal to their neighbours and to the Gov- 
ernment in the hour of test. They are, most of them, as 
true and loyal Americans as if they had never known any 
other fealty or allegiance. They will be prompt to stand 
with us in rebuking and restraining the few who may be 
of a different mind and purpose. If there should be dis- 
loyalty it will be dealt with with a firm hand of stern re- 



pression ; but, if it lifts its head at all, it will lift it only 
here and there and without countenance except from a 
lawless and malignant few. 

It is a distressing and oppressive duty, Gentlemen of 
the Congress, which I have performed in thus addressing 
you. There are, it maybe, many months of fiery trial and 
sacrifice ahead of us. It is a fearful thing to lead this great 
peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disas- 
trous of all wars, civilization itself seeming to be in the bal' 
ance. But the right is more precious than peace, and we 
shall fight for the things which we have always carried 
nearest our hearts, — for democracy, for the right of those 
who submit to authority to have a voice in their own gov- 
ernments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for 
a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free 
peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and 
make the world itself at last free. To such a task we can 
dedicate our lives and our fortunes, everything that we 
are and everything that we have, with the pride of those 
who know that the day has come when America is priv- 
ileged to spend her blood and her might for the principles 
that gave her birth and happiness and the peace which she 
has treasured. God helping her, she can do no other. . 



THE • RIVERSIDE • PRESS 

CAMBRIDGE • MASSACHUSETTS 

U • S • A 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium O) 
Treatment Date: MAY 

PreservationTechnol 

* WORLD LEADER IN PAPER BRESE 



